


Silent Night

by Alison_Ocean



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Drabble, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Kastlechristmas, Please be gentle, To Be Continued(?), drabble tag, reference to claire temple, super sloppy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-13 19:28:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9138238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alison_Ocean/pseuds/Alison_Ocean
Summary: Conscious thought gave way to instinct as he turned corner after corner. The urge to reach some ephemeral destination burned so hotly beneath the fog that he became numb to the cold. Numb to the burning in his right arm. Numb to everything except the motion of putting one step in front of the other.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a #kastlechristmas gift for @karenforfrank. I've been very sick, so this is very sloppy/unedited. But hopefully you find something you like in it. :)

The bareness of the dimly-lit streets was soothing, like a dark, quiet balm on a burning wound. A cold wind scraped against his cheekbone, smearing the blood under his left eye like war paint. Through narrowed vision he saw that his path was unobstructed. Not a soul in sight.

The silence was taught and tenuous. Such a deathlike hush was a rarity for the Kitchen. This time of year the bars should be crowded; overflowing into the streets with rivers of laughter and alcohol-soaked panting. It didn’t occur to him to raise his leaden arm to check the time. It had been 0200 hours when he’d scoped out the warehouse. An indeterminate amount of time had passed since then.

Maybe everyone was home with their families. It was January, after all. Weren’t New Year’s resolutions supposed to hold until at least February? Then the bars would fill to bursting again, and all the filth people had shoved under their proverbial rugs in light of the holidays would seep through the floorboards and start the rotting cycle all over again.

But he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth tonight. He needed the silence; the solitude. The calm to juxtapose the chaos that was churning beneath the surface.

The alleyways opened for him like vacuous mouths and he slouched through them, brushing against brick walls, weaving on his feet. Snowy slush littered the pavement like a dirty carpet. Ever few steps he would look down and see a faint splattering of crimson in the soiled ice, marking his progress. _Shit_. When had he started bleeding again? The street rippled deceptively in front of his eyes and he blinked once, slowly. A shimmer of honey blonde hair flashed in his periphery, accompanied by a child’s playful laugh. The sound made him shudder, and a knot of cold dread coiled in his gut.

_“A lot of toy dinosaurs…”_

_“Yeah, those were hers – those were Lisa’s. She used to make these little noises when she’d play with them…”_

Harsh fluorescent light flickered once, then vanished. His legs felt hollow, and he could feel his pulse pounding behind his eyes with enough force to pop them out of their sockets. He leaned heavily in a frost-encrusted doorway to catch his breath and achieve his bearings.

He just needed to make it home. “Home” being a cheap apartment on the lower east side, where if you paid rent on time and didn’t make noise, no one asked any questions. He could camp out for a day, wait until the toxins burned through his bloodstream. He just needed a place to sweat out the poison and weather the hallucinations.

Frank shrugged off the dragging weariness and regained his feet.

Minutes passed sluggishly, one second dragging into the next. His eyes barely lifted above his feet as he walked, and it was a monumental effort to keep putting one in front of the other. Flickering streetlamps passed overhead, their garish shine reflecting off the clumps of ice that hung suspended in the air. He was living in a timeless world, were everything was frozen still except for him. He should be frozen too, but for some reason he kept going. Kept moving.

Conscious thought gave way to instinct as he turned corner after corner. The urge to reach some ephemeral destination burned so hotly beneath the fog that he became numb to the cold. Numb to the burning in his right arm. Numb to everything except the motion of putting one step in front of the other.

It didn’t occur to him to question where he was going until he was there. Vague recognition crept up on him as his bloodied hands curled around the black steel bars of a fire escape ladder. Some elusive warning bell sounded in the back of his mind, but he was too focused on climbing to heed it. The full realization of what he’d done didn’t hit until he found himself lying face-up on cold metal, eyes staring up at the stained overhang of a familiar apartment building.

“ _Jesus…_ Frank?”

He felt a cold palm press against his cheek and he flinched alert, eyes snapping open. He hadn’t even realized they’d drifted closed. Blue eyes, standing out from a pale face, floated above him. Blonde hair, the color of winter sunlight, swung loose, nearly brushing his shoulders as she leaned in close.

“Frank…Frank, can you hear me?”

He recognized her voice. In a brief moment of clarity, he wanted to bash his own skull in. Shit. _Shit._ Why in god’s name was he at Karen Page’s apartment? The details of her face came into focus, and everything abruptly clicked together. His sudden, burning determination for some unspoken place, after aimlessly wandering for blocks. The desire for home that had snuck up on him, echoing in his mind again and again like a drill.

All he could do was mentally shake his head at himself, at this point. For not seeing this coming. _Karen Page is_ not _a goddamn contingency plan,_ he wanted to shout at his subconscious. The part of his mind that, thanks to the cut on his arm, was sparking like a blown circuit board.

Her eyebrows were drawn together in something that reminded him of fear. The cold hand shifted from his cheek to his forehead, and he fought to keep still, to not buck off the concern that was so characteristic of her. He still hadn’t said anything to her, he realized belatedly. The line between thoughts and words was becoming indistinguishable, and he was shocked that he wasn’t babbling.

“Page.”  

His voice hoarse, he started with the obvious. Part of him also wanted to confirm that he was really seeing her; that she wasn’t some shade dragged up from the murky depths to torture him.

She finally moved her hand away. “God, you’re burning up.”

He could see her breath making misty clouds in the frigid air. The sight alone was enough to make him shiver convulsively. If this was a hallucination it was a convincing one.

“Frank…Frank, listen to me…”

_“Frank!”_

_Pine branches closed in around them, suffocatingly close. Stars rained down, blazing, illuminating the violence in his eyes. There was nothing left to hide behind. She saw him._

_“Frank!”_

The phantom scream sounded in his ears, so loud and real that he jerked. His eyes flipped open. Damn, they’d closed again without him noticing.

The forest was gone. There was the sound of fabric rustling.

“You have to help me–”

He heard her voice again and felt a faint tugging beneath his shoulders. Looking down, he registered two hands wedged beneath his arms, clutching fistfuls of his jacket. Based on the way she was gritting her teeth, he could tell that she was putting a lot of effort into pulling him, trying to get his body closer to her gaping window. Her determination both amused and touched him. He wondered absently how she’d planned on hauling him over the window ledge that rested half a foot above the fire escape. With that familiar glint of steel in her eyes, she’d probably think of something. Miss Page was brilliant in her persistence – even of that persistence put her in some shitbag’s crosshairs. Or his, for that matter, he recalled with a grimace.

Catching one of her hands in his, Frank gently but firmly uncurled her fingers from his jacket. He levered an elbow underneath his torso and slowly rolled to his knees. The pounding in his head accelerated to a frenzied pitch with the simple motion, and he sat still for a moment, half-expecting to black out right there on the landing. The cut on his arm throbbed viciously. When he didn't lose consciousness, he reached out and grasped the white window sill. One leg at a time, he cautiously lowered himself into her apartment.

His feet had only just hit the wood floor when she was suddenly pressed up against his side, shouldering his left arm, holding him up as much as possible as she dragged him further into the room. Her lead-riddled walls surrounded him like a cathedral, silently offering him a sanctuary that he would never – could never – deserve.

_I can’t be here._

The arguably sane part of his brain came thrashing back to the surface now that he was inside.

This was beyond a bad idea. His thoughts were already slipping…who knew what he would see once the fever really dug its claws in. As if on cue, a baby’s crib flickered into existence in the corner of the room, only to disappear when he looked directly at it.

He shook his head, despite the knowledge that this would do nothing to clear it. It wasn’t a brain injury that was the problem. It was whatever weaponized toxin the Yakuza were dipping their knives in these days.

He was only catching glimpses of the nightmare that was waiting for him on the other side of the veil. For her to be anywhere near him when that flimsy curtain dropped…he might as well crack open his own skull and hand her a flashlight. Go ahead, poke around, unravel me. See what hopeless, sentimental bullshit you can dig out of what remains of the man in front of you.

_I can’t be here._

Karen looked up at him. “What?”

He hadn’t realized he’d said the words aloud.

The destination she seemed to be pulling him towards – her couch – looked miniature from his perspective. It didn’t matter though, because his legs buckled after only a few steps. He heard her cry out in surprise and, of course, she tried to catch him as he dropped heavily to the floor. He came down hard on one knee, then twisted his body away from her as he fell the rest of the way, so she couldn’t possibly catch the bulk of his weight.

He blinked slowly up from the floorboards. He thought he sucked in a breath. Her image flickered in front of him as if on a shoddy film reel - in one frame she was bending over him, her hands on his shoulders, her mouth forming words too fast for him to follow. In the next frame she was crouched next to him, biting her lip as she wrestled his arm out of his jacket sleeve. He felt dexterous hands cradle his right bicep. A lock of silvery hair whispered across his cheek.

 _Pain._ He turned his head and saw her gently probing the gash on his arm. Her brow was furrowed in concentration and, he guessed, worry. The oozing cut peeked out from the slashed fabric of his black shirt. It looked angry and red, even to his sore eyes.

Her concern bled through her fingertips. He could feel her uncertainty in the way the pads of her thumbs cautiously traced the outline of the cut. Could feel her anxiety in the shallow, controlled breaths she was pulling in.

 He felt a twinge of urgency. Before he blacked out (and it was almost a given that he would), he needed to give her some reassurance. It was bad enough that he was on the floor of her apartment to begin with. She didn’t deserve that. But she definitely didn’t deserve to spend the whole night worrying whether or not he was a dead man already. Given her seemingly endless capacity to give a shit about him, it seemed a very real possibility. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut and opened them again, trying to bring the room into sharper focus.

“Yakuza.” When she looked up, her expression confused, he nodded at the wound. “Started coating their blades.” The world tilted and he blinked again. Refocused with effort. “Red thought they might be upping their game. Trying to compete with the Hand.” Trying and failing, he noted silently. If this had been one of the Hand’s blades, he’d be a hell of a lot closer to dead. He swallowed thickly. “Shouldn’t kill me.” He was at least certain of that. His eyes drifted to the low ceiling overhead.

He heard a quiet huff of exasperation. “Yeah, like that makes me feel any better.” She muttered under her breath. Damn, at least he’d tried. As everything faded, Frank had the ridiculous urge to grin.

* * *

 

Minutes or hours passed, he couldn’t tell. The yellow light behind his eyelids flickered as opaque shapes crossed in front of it. One voice wove in and out of the shadows boldly, first nearby and then far away. Sometimes a sentence or a word would bring him briefly to the surface.

“…at my apartment…”

“…don’t know what kind of…”

“…thought the Yakuza were…”

On the fringe of these there was often another voice, muted and far away, like it was coming through a phone speaker. He scrutinized that one more closely, but the words wobbled and blurred together indistinguishably.

Sometimes he was aware of the floor beneath him. It was ice where it pressed against him; the cold permeated his clothing. The air around him was shimmering frost cloud, while internally he burned. Every fragile ligament connecting the intricate web of tendons, muscles, joints and bones that swam beneath his skin – someone may as well have doused it all in kerosene and lit a match. Call it a fever or call it hell; he had fire and brimstone regardless.

_The white-hot Afghan sun orbited above him. Its rays were burning him, flaying him alive. The blood dripping down his arm ignited like napalm. The flames crawled across his shoulder, fiery tongues licking at his skin, turning it black. The agony was knife-sharp, jolting–_

His eyelids struggled open on a hiss of pain. His right arm felt like it was being branded with a hot iron. He was surprised that he didn’t smell burning flesh as he turned his head to look.

“What the hell...” He spoke through gritted teeth, his voice low and dry as dead leaves.

Blonde hair again, inches from his face. One of her hands was bracing his arm while the other was slowly emptying the contents of a glass into the cut. Brown liquid the color of tea dribbled across jagged flesh, and it seared worse than salt where it made contact.

“Matt’s nurse friend, Claire, knows a thing or two about toxins.” Karen’s voice was muted. She sounded distracted. Her forehead was creased and she wasn’t meeting his eyes. She emptied the last of the glass, then put it aside and grabbed a towel to soak up what had spilled. “This is supposed to help.”

She didn’t sound too confident in that, not that it mattered to him. She could pour whatever she wanted into him; it couldn’t be worse than the shit that was already swimming in his veins.

She finally straightened her back and sat up. He heard a quavery exhale. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her worrying the towel with her fingers before finally setting it down. She raked both hands through her hair and tucked it behind her ears, something he’d filed away long ago as a stress tic. Her eyes finally darted to his, as if to check that he was still with her.

“What’s in it?” He honestly didn’t care at the moment, he just wanted to keep her talking. The sharp pain had given him a brief window of semi-clarity, despite the heaviness that still dragged at him, and he didn’t want the moment to pass yet.

“Um…” She absently fingered the empty glass. “Baking soda, water…” Her lips twisted ironically. “...scotch whiskey.”

He blew out a breath of air. “No wonder it burns.”

She gave a half-hearted huff of agreement and glanced down. “The fever should break in a few hours.”

He grunted his acknowledgement. He’d had worse prognoses.

“I guess you’ll just have to stay here until then.”

He snorted unexpectedly at the way she phrased it. “Thinking about kicking me out?”

“Well…” she seemed to think hard for a moment, “I could always call Matt. _He_ might have better luck carrying you down the stairs.”

No visible reaction – he didn’t even twitch. He just stared up at her from the floor, his eyes full of warning.

“Don’t you dare.”

It was a look that had made worse men than him start begging for their lives. But Karen just shook her head and gave an enigmatic little half-smile. She dutifully collected the towel and glass and rolled to her knees.

“Relax, Frank.”

He followed the soft pads of her footfalls as she walked to the kitchen. He heard the squeak of a sponge against glass, and the splash of water in a metal sink. Warm, familiar sounds.

_Yellow light filtering through beige curtains. The clatter of silverware against empty plates. The feel of a hot summer night through screen-covered windows._

His mind roiled beneath the nostalgia, simultaneously resisting and giving in to it. Push and pull.

It was always push and pull with her.

Mercifully, the sounds eventually melted away. His arm felt cool – the pain reduced to a dull throb against the floorboards. The night closed over him and he welcomed the silence.

 


End file.
